http://hirotafutakuchi.blog.jp
Futaguchi Daigaku and Hirota Yuumi are the Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor of the Kyoto shogekijo movement. Appearing together in Chekhov’s The Bear and Kishida Kunio and Betsuyaku Minoru’s short plays, they perform couples in distress as a subtle dance of sidelong looks, pauses, confrontations, and hesitating backtracks. The empty space is instantly transformed into a time-machine ride to a believable tale, which frequently grows increasingly absurd, terrifying and comic in turns. What an asset to Kyoto!
Futakuchi’s range is wide: on his own in others’ productions he plays it straight, with a formidable physical dexterity and dancerly presence. He has performed in Noho Theatre Group productions I’ve directed for over twenty years, always bringing a fresh, professional attitude to the roles. On the other hand, every time I see Hirota—who teaches at my university alongside Futakuchi--she seems to be playing some sort of hysteric woman, yelling and throwing things, threatening people, or talking to herself. It’s a guilty pleasure to see an attractive, smilingly confident woman begins to deteriorate and distort before your eyes, like a candle dripping wax, infected with some uncontrollable passion manifesting itself ineluctably and increasingly bumpily.
At the tiny (60 seat) Ningen-za Theatre in northeast Kyoto, the duo performed absurdist mystery Betsuyaku’s Cranbon Laughed, クランボんが笑った directed by Hirota herself. The theatre was completely full of mostly student and young spectators. The “set” consisted of three chairs, one lying on its side. As a touring production (going to three more cities this month) it is extremely portable if short at 60 minutes.
The show also perfectly showcased the two actors’ individual talents and thepair’s chemistry. Hirota was superb as a dominating but slightly unhinged lady, saying outrageous and hurtful things in a controlled, low-register voice of a proper middle-class woman. Meanwhile Futakuchi was obsequious and squeamish in terms, obviously caught between his duties to his managers and reluctant acquiescence to the Woman’s absurd demands. Without a whiff of romantic potential between them, they resembled nothing less than crabs circling each other at claw’s length, responding to slight inflections, glares or welcoming gestures. These are actors who seem to listen, performing in a well-rehearsed machine all the more macabre for its nightmarish content.
Kyoto needs actors like this: able to interpret a play with their own flavor, one that adds spice to any dish but remains perceptible as uniquely their own. I look forward to their next production, this time with their home theatre group Konoshitayami, Chekhov’s Three Sisters. under less naturalistic director 山口浩章.
http://www.gekken.net/actorslabo/cn31/pg668.html
Spoiler alert: full summary
Cranbon laughed is supposedly based on Miyazawa Kenji’s short story, so I eagerly read Wild Pear in an English translation. A river Crab siblings are remarking on the "Cranbon" (a wild apple? or made-up word) who laughed as he was killed. They are disturbed on a summer day by a large fish disappearing into the sky after lunging after a flashing blue-black pointed object. The Father assures his scared sons that it is only a Kingfisher and that they are safe. In the autumn, a wild pear drops into the lower branches of a tree above them, and the Father tells them to wait, and it will decay and fall into the water making a sweet wine.
The only connection to Betsuyaku’s work I could fathom was the idea that reality depends on perspective. The baby crabs have no idea what is happening, the Father assures them all is well, and life goes on regardless (except for the fish). Betsuyaku’s take is complicated by doubling and backtracking, mistaken identities and unreliable flashbacks—a dream or hallucinatory world which can only end in death, but keeps us hanging in the sky for a moment of almost sadomasochistic beauty. Ultimately, like Miyazawa’s hauntingly lyric prose and Betsuyaku’s staccato absurdities, only human imagination is the clear winner.
A middle-age or older Woman strolls with a parasol enjoying a quiet stroll. She seems perfectly bourgeois and normal until she speaks: it is midnight on a moonlit night. We realize that she has some sort of psychological problem, and we are witnessing a hallucination or nightmare. She talks to herself but is unsurprised when she asks if anyone is around and there is an answer—it seems at her hospice-like hospital that attendants lurk everywhere.
This time the offstage voice turns out to be a white-gloved assiduous Man. He sets out a wooden table and chair for her, as well as table-cloth with a stain. “Why are you here?” “I am helping you.” “I don’t want help, I’m out hiking by myself.” “Do you need a tablecloth? “I don’t need one!” she protests. Regretfully he informs her, “but it’s protocol”, ignoring her protests. She has packed two cups and sets them out, along with a thermos of tea and two cucumber sandwiches. He stands at the ready, but she invites him to sit down, since no one else appears to be around. Together they try to puzzle out their relationship. The Woman doesn’t know why she packed two cups and sandwiches, “sometimes you do something unconsciously and then only afterwards you realize, ‘oh, that is what I was thinking.’” Meanwhile the Man receives instructions via telephone, assuring his supervisor that he has followed protocol. The Man continues their strange picnic, sparring over to to take off his white gloves or not, occasionally relaying her progress to a superior via telephone.
They share secrets: her former roommate, a Russian woman, told her about this serene place behind the church. She had been born in Harbin but on the way to Dailin and a last train to Japan when her husband Mikhail fell sick and couldn’t make it. She would call out “anata” (you, dear) in her sleep, still dreaming of her dead husband. Years later, the Woman has packed a picnic for two—Her former roommate Maria Antonova? Or her husband Mikhail? The Man asks whether she was ever married, or living with someone, but the Woman assures him no. However on reflection she suddenly goes off to check her records in the office—“it’s closed! No one’s there! But I know you weren’t” says the Man. She returns, “So you’ve read my records. And lied. From now on, no more lies, speak precisely and correctly.” Ashamed, he admits that he read her file, and all the patients, in order to keep them safe. When she probes “who are you,” he admits, although told not to, that he is the funeral director, as patients at the hospice do not last long.
He lets slip that he met Maria Antonova had visited before, which he had lied about earlier. He made her promise not to tell anyone. So the Woman realizes that Maria told her to come here to meet him. The Man had heard Maria’s confession: that when Mikhail was ill and couldn’t escape with her to Japan, he gave her a cyanide capsule and she fed it to him and killed him. Well-dressed, behind the Church, he thought he was a Priest, not the funeral director.
In the spirit of honesty, the Woman brings out objects that could hurt herself—or him—a razor blade, the point of her parasol, and finally a sheathed knife. The Man, shaken, receives them one by one for safe-keeping, why she keeps such things on her. “To kill yourself, or to hurt others?” “Maybe to kill you?” she wonders.
They continue their picnic, strained by her demands that he not make noise when drinking tea, and not allowing him to examine the inside of the beautiful sandwich. Although the cucumber sandwich is delicious the mustard is very harsh, and clumped together; the Man winces and gulps his tea. “I do it on purpose; to experience life directly.” He wants to remove it but she insists that he, too, experience life. Wincing, he eats the 2nd sandwich. Finally she confronts him: why did he tell her secrets he should have kept? Maria Antonova assumed he was a Priest, and he deceived her. “But I never told anyone, until tonight!” “Why did you tell me!” She smiles that she has put poison in the tea and he’ll be dead soon. He coughs into her handkerchief and disappears. The phone rings, “Not here. Cranbon is dead.”
As Hirota notes in the pamphlet, Cranbon's laughing even as he is killed shouldn't be funny, and we shouldnt be enjoying this bizarre hullucination by a troubled woman. But we do.
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